Commericals 2.0: Advertising the Divine
The hyperbolic nature of Marshall McLuhan's statement, "Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century" does not take away from the truth it calls attention to. Nearly everything around us is based on that boundless web of forces called advertising. As the most prevalent form of contemporary advertising, commercials are the dominant artistic genre of the 20th and the 21st century. Look around: chances are you are surrounded by commercials more than by any other cultural artifact. The average person is exposed to 3,000 commercial advertising messages every day (in comparison to 650 in 1985). By the age of 35 we are exposed to about 150,000 thirty second commercials. As a culture we watch more commercials than we read books, visit the theater or go to the movies.
In a world where culture has migrated onto the net, the primary form it takes is that of the commercial-- one could actually say that we are creating an online culture based on advertising.
Conversion in a Consumer Product
"No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data" wrote McLuhan in his 1964 book, Understanding Media, introducing the notion that in a new world of hyper capitalism advertising is more exacting, powerful and far reaching than the academic work of legions of researchers and experts. Advertisements affect society much more directly and efficiently than academia because the commercial are more in synch with the playful irreverence of electronic culture than that of the often arid rationalism of the academy.
And so we have reached the current situation where what we call culture is the thin veil of commercialization that we feel the necessity to apply to even the most ordinary, everyday products. Popular music and television shows are concocted by advertising agencies in order to convey commercial messages in a more effective manner.
It is difficult to talk about (mass) culture in isolation from advertising. Advertising is our culture.
According to McLuhan commercials are meant for unconscious, subliminal consumption. Douglas Rushkoff furthers this argument when he writes that TV is a technology for programming people. When we watch television we let the mimetic objects which are being omitted from the TV set run in our consciousness like code sections running inside a computer. Words, voices and symbols which come from within the screen are put in the center of our attention; they become the center of our world and act as a consciousness transmission. Television is a sort of hypnosis.
Commercials are in that sense the essence of TV in its purest form: precise 30 second messages which are aimed to create a chirurgical intervention in the viewer's consciousness, catalyze a process of conversion and bring him to action. The decision to migrate from one product to another is conversion's correlate in the consumer world and commercials are the attempt to refine that great mystical experience into a short passage of media revelation.
Pills of deception
Commercials convey consciousness in an effective way but these consciousness forms have negative consequences because they are based on ulterior motives—greed based motives of obtaining more money.
In order to be successful, commercials base themselves on the endless fostering of discontent. This discontent is normally rooted in the recognition that the consumer lacks something, that he or she is unhappy or alternatively could be happier if only he or she buys something.
The commercial will teach you about the incompleteness of your situation which will manifest itself in more and more ways while always demanding more and more STUFF from a wide variety of corporations aimed at recreating a lost sense of wholeness: i.e., the idea is that you’ll feel happier once you purchase a car, a house, a candy bar, a tech gadget, a Pilates class, new clothes, etc.
But despite these obvious adverse psychic effects we gulp down endless amounts of these poisons. Commercials, after all, are the price of admission into our commercials based culture yet all the while we tell ourselves that commercials do not influence us.
Media is second-hand psychedelics
After discussing all these evident shortcomings of the commercials, it’s time to get back to the positive side of this whole story, to the great untapped potential of this medium which is implied in some of McLuhan’s statements.
Psychedelic philosopher Terrence McKenna was no less a great provocateur than McLuhan and as well he was perhaps the greatest savage among the philosophers, not only due to the bulk of mind altering substances he consumed but because his theories are jungles of tangled, maniac, carnivorous ideas.
One of these wild proposals was that the human race could no longer allow itself to have an unconscious. According to McKenna, the idea of having an inaccessible part of our psyche that cannot be controlled is an unthinkable situation in the current state of our technological evolution. He argues that the supposed need for such a part is based on a series of lies which our culture has to rid itself of as soon as possible. An unconscious is tolerable when hunting wild boars in the forest but not when you hold the keys to weapons of mass destruction which have the capacity to annihilate the planet in a single moment.
According to McKenna, the media is a visual illustration of our collective unconscious and divulges the structure of that unconscious, thus creating the basis for making it shared consciousness. McKenna believes that television's visual language of cut and paste composition is influenced by psychedelic experience. These experiences are then retransmitted into mass society through television, making it a source of “second-hand psychedelics”.
Advertising the divine
"If God manifested himself to us, he would do so in the form of a product advertised on TV" (Philip K. Dick)
Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik depicts a world undergoing a process of deterioration and degeneration which can only be stopped using a consumer product in the form of ornately striped spray can.
Dick understood the deep force and meaning which commercials carry in our culture very well. Ubik is full of commercials bearing cosmic messages. Each chapter in the novel begins with a commercial for a mysterious consumer product called Ubik, and each advertisement exposes Ubik as a totally different form of product. At one time Ubik is salad dressing, at another it is a detergent; it appears as a medicine for the stomach, as a shaving blade, as a brassiere, as a hair crème, etc, etc. Ubik is a sort of master-product which symbolizes humanity's never ending wish to appropriate the world. The Ubik spray which appears near the end of Dick's book is a spray which can give life to anything – it is a spray which fulfills the part of God fighting the devil which destroys the world.
Ubik equates the way modern consumers seek salvation from consumer products to seeing salvation from God. In a godless world we go to consumer products so that they will fix the biggest conflicts in our life. God's part in correcting the world has been privatized to numerous groups of consumer products collectively called "Ubik."
Real advertisements for divine light are advertisements which will not emphasize that which is lacking but the abundance coming from within. Such advertisements for God would concentrate not on consumer products but on the process of creation. A pursuit to create such commercials stood in the basis of the 4th episode of the intergalactic master’s course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GSBGcorKm4
In this episode which deals with the effects of media the Intergalactic Underground tried to disclose a few of media's influences and create a preliminary attempt at creating a divine commercial for some kind of Ubik, in this case a coke composed of light.
While this specific attempt was somewhat underdeveloped, it is a proposition for others who might wish to continue and develop this notion of a new kind of commercials. Commercials which will not sell you products, but sell you to yourself. These new commercials will expose the inner areas in the inner mall of consciousness and inform consciousness consumers about the products which exists within.
By working from such a model we would be able to create creative and sincere commercials which will act as transformative media pills. Imagine a world surrounded not by advertisements of things you can buy, but by psychedelic commercials which call you to explore your inner life. Such cultural artifacts can then function as the building stones of a new media-ecology which will sustain man's effort of cultural and spiritual transformation.
Tweet- 4-28-08
- Ido Hartogsohn's blog
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Comments
In Tears
This is so awesome, (and hilarious,) I'm in tears over it; This is perhaps the electroshock treatment version of "inspiring others."
I'm still trying to figure out: "How can the message of inspiration and self-fulfillment be connected with the spirit of service to all life?"
How can the zeal and felicity of the New Age community be connected with the selflessness and service of the Christian community, in a way that's more Divine than mere "balancing"?
Speculative Dystopia
Everybody Now
Great article!
I found these commercials, or they found me, awhile back - it's great to attend these master's courses again!
Cory Doctorow recently blogged about Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" and a recent talk by Shirky that's related to all this.
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from the article:
Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity
... And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into ... an architecture of participation.
To Mink
Daring!
Ads not the answer
David Foster Wallace's The Infinite Jest
I'm not too sure how many of you have read this, but in the book there is a group that creates consciousness changing commercials through the study of art and psyche. Most of the commercials are ridiculous to the point that they cause reactions similar to epileptic fits so I doubt they'd ever make it on "television" as it is today... but let's neverunderstimate the power of art..
All bridges can be rebuilt.
Consciousness Changing Media
I know that, personally speaking, my way of life has been changed by various movies, including such oldies & goodies as Labyrinth, The Never Ending Story, and, ... more embarrassingly, more recently, by way of my daughter, Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D.
{;)}=
And then there's "Network," urging people to turn off their TVs.
Did Network alter consciousness? Did it cause anybody to turn off their TVs?
I think the effects of these things can't be recognized immediately. But I do think the movie Network did change consciousness.
In my personal experience, I change my behavior later, after an idea has had time to percolate.
If that applies to others as well, then I'm afraid we don't have an easy way of determining if these media actions influence people or not.
To Lion Kimbro
Like many other films, Network becomes part of the great underground pressures shifting our culture tectonic plates of consciousness.
To my mind, there seems to be no question that media influences consciousness: whether it be psychedelic drugs, computer software or TV programming. All these things give us tools with which to think and perceive, and thus shape our model of reality.
Even if we can't always see the influence of media in the short term (you could measure blood pressure and pulse and brain waves after watching an hour of commercials, and after watching a Godfrey Reggio film - I am sure they would be completely different) I would say that you can see the clear effect on media when looking at societies. Seems to me that the American society and for me the Israeli one, are really a reflection of the media they consume, especially if you compare them to traditional societies which consume completely different sorts of media (sacral chanting, religious music and writing, psychedelic drugs etc.) Understanding Media [as McLuhan calls it] (the different forms of media which influence different forms of consciousness) is the first step.
The second step is to try to create media which will create certain paths for man and his consciousness. This is what Joyce and McKenna called, man becoming dirigible - McLuhan thought about that too. We have to become conscious about the media spaces in which we exist, and transform them (and ourselves) in a dirigible way. A way which will sustain wholeness, brotherliness and the sense of the divine. peace, Ido
media as architecture
Medium being the Message
Propaganda Anonymous I
'm diggin on the theory Ido.
Adverts as art...
Pop Art as Spiritual.
Bringing back what was lost to the reproduction process. The practical side of this though could just be that the Medium of the Advert itself could be The Art form. The cut and paste structure that holds keys to cultural evolution.
That's why I am a fan of subtle irony
If you wanna approach topics such as universal feelings of brother and sister hood I wonder how a 'hot' appearance might go over.
The commercial, at times, seemed like it could appeal to the kid. The pokeman, the super bright colors
If you went a little farther with the bright colors you could find yourself a hipster audience.
I like the subtitles.
However, the overt calls to distress seem to try to trigger those same parts of modern commercials that Rushkoff criticizes in his book COERCION, as something that we should try to avoid. Those sales techniques seem to be part of the problem, and by repeating the appeals to people's fear emotions we might be filling the shoes of those we wish to discard.
I commend the effort though.
At least attempting a revision of cultural meta-programs is something I think is cool.
Concision is NOT consciousness
Maybe at one time, commercials were an art-form, but at this point in time, commercials are not even pablum, they are poisons and worse than "Chinese water torture". In the US, we regularly are forced to ignore the same ads as re-runs concomittantly. They don't even intersperse them with other ads, they run as repeats one after the same ad. And next worse, one after another bad ad. I guess the programmers thought we might have missed it while we left the room, and so, were safe to "stick it to" us.
Commercials as vehicles of "higher consciousness"????
I'm sorry, Ito, but I must say: vain hope. Even as a kid in the 50s, I was amazed to hear of tv in France, in which entertainment was uninterrupted by ads, but ads were not ignored: they were given in blocs of time that was watched eagerly as an artform and entertainment too. I couldn't believe it. How nice, if so.
Commercialism is a form of cancer. You may not mind a little pimple-sized bump that disappears after a couple of days, but if it persists and grows larger with time, you are going to be pissed off about that.
Nowadays, we have 1000's of channels to "tune into". But even in these paid-for channels, you have large blocs of time devoted to "paid-for-programming". Huh!?? I thought I already paid for the programming, and didn't think it should entail having to go through all these perambulations with my remote to avoid them! But no! Well, more money for them, less value for us.
And in "free tv", meaning, regular stations like ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, I STILL have to deal with 'ADS', and these ads are so prolific that shows like STAR TREK, the original series, cannot be viewed en toto, but segments are cut to accomodate the greater number of commercials (to say nothing about the bastardization of these original shows with cgi modifications or "fancying up" by making those art forms seem more glitzy. This is even worse than the "colorization" of original black-and-white movies because it alters the work of those whose job it was to "animate" those primitive works. Well, "jobs" for cgi-whores).
I presume you know what "concision" means. It is the amount of time you have to create something before it has to stop in order to make room for a commercial. A Zen Buddhist would say it is the amount of time you have to focus you mind before you absolutely have to get up and take a piss or before you get kicked out of the place for stinking like a wet cat. For the modern kid, it is the amount of time you can hold his or her attention before they expect an ad or some form of interruption, and you can see where I'm going....right? I'm not saying kill your tv, I'm advocating kill your sheepish acceptance of the imposition of ads and of ad-men's ideas into your mind! God-forbid that ad-men take over the higher-consciousness movement!!! Are you kidding!????
I'd like to say I'm insulted that this paper by Ido Hartogsohn was even considered, except I think it is an important paper insofar as it allows me to say: consciousness modification by some form of messaging, whether overt or subliminal is just dastardly. How can you possibly think it might be a good thing? I'm astounded, I mean, literally astounded you could even suggest it. I thought RS was a medium for changes by conscious, intelligent, self-informed individuals with an aim at self-effort and willingness to change the world by means of honesty and fairness and motivated by a loving-kind heart. To resort to subtle insidious methods that typify the commercial mind-set for this end, is just a way to attach the ideal of being good to some purchase, something entirely external to the ideal of liberation to materialism.
Or where you talking about expanding the long-defunct and admirable concept of the PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT? You are aware, that such are no longer funded by tax dollars, but only by commercial interests? Or, maybe not. And where did you grow up?
I think, in fact, you are playing devil's advocate there. I think you wanted to elicit such a rebuke. I cannot con- ceive that you really believe what you wrote, because if you did, you would be inviting me to say your ideas are as bad as your grammar. Let me reiterate the sub-text of my statement: we want creative writing, we don't need the ads to help us enjoy such. We don't need ads to help us think giving our families the goods of technology.
This is something really very sad about television: they think we are stupid because we haven't boycotted their stupid methods heretofore. But, and here's a tip to a "developer", if a station should ever exist that put on a half hour, an hour or more of acting and left commercial subsidization markers to the end, even if it lasted half an hour, it would provoke real gratitude and promote product support like nothing they've ever seen.
As such, promoters would be seen as sincere founders of Art, rather than as parasites of it. We would see a change in the way writers are attributed and thanked for their work. As it stands, we are only just beginning to see how they are thanked due to the recent writer's strike.
Maybe you haven't noticed it, but there has been a real glut of very poor and shoddy material showing up on tv since then. You are seeing the result of a "compromise" and the work of scabs. It is the purely commercial interest, the monitary, profit oriented "altering of consciousness" that has produced this ill effect. It is "developerism" writ large, the same kind of mentality that wants to make space exploration a matter of "tourism" rather than sincere scientific and humanitarian interest.
I'm sorry Ito, I find your hopes of advertizing vain and worse than worthless. It is an abomination. Our aim should be that we support artists and art with no desire for some return than the art itself.
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:Letter writing is still the most potent way to raise the consciousness of elected representatives: it's a record they cannot ignore and cannot say they were unaware.
A somewhat delayed reply
Dear Rogerscott,
I believe you might have misunderstood some parts of my article. I generally agree with most of what you wrote in your lengthy reply. I too think that commercials are a quite abominable and harmful force in our society etc. etc.
In talking about making divine commericals I did not suggest giving this power away to commerical companies, as I think I clearly stated in my article. Rather, what I tried to point to was the mystic power of commericals and media in general to act as consciousness changing artifacts and the idea of trying to create a transformative media ecology - a media that will be created not by corporates but by users and that will not support capitalism but inner exploration.
Of course the whole idea of commericals has some shady parts to it to begin with. However, considering the media soaked environment we live in, such messages could act as much needed and even indispensable antidotes. What i'm saying is that commericals are a sort of magik, and we need some white magik to counteract the black magik.
That was basically the idea. And yes, English is not my mother tongue. I apologize for not being as fluent as a native speaker, but I believe that in this global time in history, more than in any other, ideas need to reverberate in between cultures, and for that reason I am interested in communicating with a culture which speaks a language foreign to me.
Yours,
Ido
Thank you Ido
I challenge you or anyone to try to develop a list of links that talks about this, the history of it, and current avenues of access to how both have disappeared. I'm trying. I guess I may have to write to FAIR (http://www.fair.org/) to get an idea. I'm amazed at the lack of memory of people about this.
I think we are asking for too little, in seeking to influence consciousness by means of commercial media. The most potent form of disemenating enlighting insights is actually in the web-logue or "blog". It is still relatively free of commercialism, but I'm sure there are think-tanks out there that are working day and night to "correct" this deficiency or "defect" in "control".
I think I understand your intent, I only question the avenues apparently suggested for it. Here in the US, "government" has been villified, and "private enterprise" seen as the ligitimate and only reliable source for "security" and "information". We have seen private publishing companies and radio stations being bought up for over 40 years resulting in a monopoly of such.
"Right Wing" (read extremist) radio has attempted to bring everyone to a view that the "USA" is a "christian" nation, and that war and killing and even a form of "divine right of presidents" (as long as they're Republicans) is fated and "from above".
I don't know where you are from, but here in this country, at one time, we had more newspapers per city than most nations in Europe had en toto. We had a fierce pride in a diversity of opinion. Commercial interests have always seen this as an impediment to "progress". The very thing that makes the "Good old USA" what it was, has been vitiated and gutted by commercialism and "unification" of competing inteterests into "mega-corps".
Here in the "old guard" of American "individualism" and characteristic iconoclastic thinking, such is an abomination. The simple reason being: centralised controls are bound to be remote from most folk. So how does the commercial beast try to ameliorate such objection? Put a Walmart in every community center. Put Fox control in every available tv-market!
Here in the US, Fox may actually own 2 or more tv stations, and so, you don't really have any variety, you have one choice on 2 or maybe 3 different channels! Sound good to you?
Sounds like BS to me.
In view of this, to say that "commercialism" has 'some shady parts" is really a tame way of talking about what is going on here. It is not just "shady" in part, it is so infected with obfuscation and perfidy as to be utterly unsavable. It cannot be ameliorated by any alteration of "effect" since the "intent" is going to be the same: to hold your attention and to get you to see it as "benign" or maybe even "good". Then you are as insincere as the beast that has taken over all the airwaves. Even a sincere service announcement will be imbedded in a form of hatred of "government" as to make you really trust the commercial bosses.
Our system here actually had a short life, and it provided for government to stand between, to act as a brake to purely party- and industrial-interests. For a little blip of time, Jeffersonion idealism asserted itself.
I leave you to guess when it was. It is derivable by looking at local history and counting backwards to a locus of representation of interests of education and culture and resistance to the domination of the will of businessmen and the will to war.
Again, I think you are talking about Public service announcements or community service announcements or perhaps a new bread of expression unattached to "buying and selling". It must be to be sincere. It must cost us to make it, but of no one's particular profit. That means we must compel government to defend itself, and in so doing, put selfish profit oriented actions in their place in order to protect EVERY citizen, and not just the domineering, cafein/cocain/ power infused dominators. They of course want "buffers" removed so they can just run roughshod over everyone. ===========
Letter writing is still the most potent way to raise the consciousness of elected representatives: it's a record they cannot ignore and cannot say they were unawa
Removing the product from advertising
Overt-subliminal Guidance?
The ad-men are well aware that everyone has some level of obsessive-compulsiveness that only needs a little nudge to become useful to the ends they seek and which seems to have raised the effect into a disorder in many of our kids. I think it is even conceivable that the spike in autism we're seeing is partly due to television delivered "overwhelm". In urban centers you can't walk a block without seeing the subtle imagery of ads, and the mind is collecting this information whose ostensible over-all message is: you lack something, here it is.
Autism is practically unknown in primitive societies and rural environs. All "messaging" is from nature or some other living being and is interpersonal. When messages begin to infiltrate our awareness, we are basically engaged in an abstract business of interpreting and living as if in a "symbolic" world, an "autistic" state involving only the inidividual.
Your reference to a "panic" attack might be symptomatic of general trend of our highly non-interpersonal oriented society that lives by means of one way messaging: ads, and this is just another form of serfdom: our ruler tells us what we want, what we need, and we don't really talk back, we don't really exchange meaningfully, we receive, we obey. Maybe you sense this lack of concern, and you logically, or somatically respond: I have no friends here. Then you try to rationalize this unacceptible state of affairs by seeing SOMETHING good in it, but I think the "alchemy" you speak of is only rationalizing a bad thing as something "good". It is isn't good.
I just searched in google with these terms: "absense of autism in primitive society" and got one interesting URL that talks about this, but whose real thesis is hard for me to interpret as of yet. It seems to agree with my own, but the terms of the dichotomy I'm talking about are pretty well laid out:
http://mises.org/story/2849
Being engaged with others doesn't have to involve "tricks" or slight-of-hand. Everything that happens in living nature is a matter of "economy" or the exchanges that take place between two motivating centers with advantages in the sum. When flow of information is one way, this sum can be over-balanced in favor of the communicator. Your buying a product or trying to take meaning from the way the product is being impelled into your consciousness, is an over-balanced and mostly debt-favor exchange. In the boycott, the refusal to be moved, is perhaps less "positive" but it can be a means to empower your objection to this form of "social contract" so obviously not benign. It seeks to promote "unconsiousness". =========== Letter writing is still the most potent way to raise the consciousness of elected representatives: it's a record they cannot ignore and cannot say they were unawar
Don't be a bee
make me consume or buy something. My aim is to by-pass their conscious intent and ignore the product completely. So when I see a Mars branded chocolate bar I ignore the chocolate and see the god. It angers me that products and companys are allowed to use the ancient symbols as brands and this the way I have chosen to cope.
I do aggree with what you are saying on the whole and your points are interesting about autism. Perhaps my method helps me create an illusion of adverts being interpersonal messages. Two way communications between me and God(Read higher functions or whatever).
There is a contractual agreement you enter into when you come accross an advert. If you are willing to tolerate
it's presence then they will help fund the magazine/tv show/ whatever that you are watching. As a result they have paid for many a work of art. So now when we buy a product that advertises on our favourite show then we help to fund it. They do not even coerce you into paying them into paying them attention. It is possible to tune them out.
Also, the ideal that advertising is working towards is maximun efficiency. That is you will only be subjected to
advertising for products that you actually do need and want. That seams like a good idea to me.
Sometimes I play with the metaphor of advertising as flower petals. The nectar being the product. Even if you're not a bee they still look pretty.